Blogging for Small Businesses – Why Should I Blog?

If you’re one of our digital marketing clients, you know that we highly recommend blogging. Every monthly report you get will mention your blog and provide suggestions, if needed. Whether business owners are active bloggers or not, many don’t understand why they should blog. Here are some of our top reasons why blogging for small businesses is so important:

SEO is a very important reason to blog. Search engnes reward websites who continually publish content, especially content that is relevant to the site and useful for readers. If you are a lodging property, for example, blog posts about local activities and events would be relevant and helpful for your website visitors. We’ll get into more aspects of SEO and blogging in our next post.

Since we all know time is money, we won’t go as far as saying that blogging is FREE, but it is definitely a great way to market your products and services on a tight budget. If you can’t find the time to blog, you may have an employee who is willing to, or you may be able to hire a friend or family member. While your blog should be professional and grammatically correct, you don’t need a published author writing your posts.

Have a special or discount going on? Want to distribute coupons or push a certain weekend or event? Write a simple blog post about it with photos and calls to action (a book now link, “call us”, etc.) and share this link in emails and social media. Simple, inexpensive, and not too time consuming after the training we’ve provided!

A blog is a great way to share your expertise with past, present, and future clients. Let’s say you’re a fly fishing guide service. A guest has fished with you and follows you on Facebook. Because you always share your blog posts on Facebook, this guest now keeps up with your blog regularly. He values your tips, knowledge, and expertise about fly fishing and reads your blog regularly. He feels like he is keeping in touch with you by reading your blog, as well as getting useful information. Every time he returns to the area, he comes to fish with you because of this relationship.

Times are changing, and it seems like people talk face-to-face less often than before, but people still like to keep in touch. Blogging is personal, and it’s a way to extend your personality to your guests when they only get to share a short time with you during their trip. Blogging is a great way to foster relationships before and after the guest’s experience with you, and share useful expertise.
We hope this gives you some meaning and reason behind your blog. In our next post, read more about the specifics of blogging for Search Engine Optimization.